Creating interactive acoustics animations using Mathematica's Computable Document Format

The computational and graphical prowess of Mathematica has long made it a powerful educational tool for creating effective animations of acoustic and vibration phenomena [D. Russell, J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 106, 2197 (1999) and V.W. Sparrow and D.A. Russell, J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 103, 2987 (1998)]. Once an animation has been created within Mathematica it is relatively easy to convert the animation to an animated GIF file for display on a webpage [D. Russell, J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 114, 2308 (2003)]. However, such animations, while effective at communicating or illustrating complicated acoustic phenomena, are "static" in the sense that they are not interactive and a person viewing the animation cannot change parameters. Recently Wolfram Research implemented a new Computable Document Format that allows interactive plots and animations to be inserted into webpages and electronic documents. A free CDF player from Wolfram allows viewers to interact with plots and animations by moving sliders to change values of parameters. This talk will demonstrate the process of creating a CDF animation for embedding in a webpage. Other, more complex, demonstrations will also be showcased to illustrate the potential capabilities of CDF as an educational tool.